It's not
about being liberal or conservative anymore y'all. That is a hype offered by the fascist whores who want to confuse the people with lies while they turn this country into an aristocratic police state. Some people will say anything to attain power and money. There is no such thing as the Liberal Media, but the Corporate media is very real.

My local monthly district newspaper has an ancient state politician who ran against Diane Feinstein for Mayor back in the day. He gets to publish his opinion every month, often an opinion that is out of touch with a large segment (if not majority) of the residents of my district.

And it's not even good writing. He tends to basically toss into his articles whatever he got from scurrilous highly partisan sources, and thinks sprinkling his sentences with bits of poised erudition makes his arguments reasonable, rather than a fumigation technique, to prop up his tossed about ideas -- which tend to wither upon any close scrutiny.

Out of respect I didn't call him out by name.

I was saddened after reading the recent Commentary in the May 2020 issue.

However one feels about affirmative action, no reader comes away having a better understanding of the issues or policy choices after reading the column. Instead the reader is bombarded with legislative jargon, lots of strung together aggrandizing sentences and quotes, including a quotation by Edmund Burke and some obscure comment from some unnamed “college student” in the Dartmouth Review. Honestly it’s not clear how Burke’s statement about “justice” applies towards having an understanding of affirmative action, except as a sophistic embellishment that the vague premise is supported by one of the great legal scholars in history. I guess. Burke said so, so that’s that.

Okay fine, but then we are told the absentee ballots are bunk because the author culls some statement Jimmy Carter made from a 2005 Commission, which we are assured is legit because? Because Carter is not a Republican or a “bone spurs” President? Really? Oregon and Washington State have been doing absentee ballots for years without problems. And why not source more recent bodies of research other than a politically appointed Commission in 2005 or some random quote from a politician who wrote something in the Wall Street Journal. You don’t stir the pot of research with a toothpick.

How about recent studies by the Brennan Center, or MIT? Why did you also contemporaneously ignore the largest study to date on vote-by-mail — written about in the 16 April 2020 Washington Post? That study was done by Daniel M. Thompson, Jennifer Wu, Jesse Yoder, and Andrew B. Hall from Stanford University with the conclusion that there was no partisan advantage.

You are a Californian. You know about Stanford University. How come you gotta reach way back to the Bush administration and use some random politician’s quote to contrive a slanted argument?

Friday, 1 May 2020 at 8h 49m 32s

Holy shit

From 2008 until now.

The WEI is an index of real economic activity using timely and relevant high-frequency data. It represents the common component of ten different daily and weekly series covering consumer behavior, the labor market, and production. The WEI is scaled to the four-quarter GDP growth rate; for example, if the WEI reads -2 percent and the current level of the WEI persists for an entire quarter, one would expect, on average, GDP that quarter to be 2 percent lower than a year previously.

railroad traffic originated (from the Association of American Railroads),

the American Staffing Association Staffing Index,

steel production,

wholesale sales of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel,

and weekly average US electricity load (with remaining data supplied by Haver Analytics).

All series are represented as year-over-year percentage changes. These series are combined into a single index of weekly economic activity.

For additional details, including an analysis of the performance of the model, see Lewis, Mertens, and Stock (2020), “U.S. Economic Activity during the Early Weeks of the SARS-Cov-2 Outbreak.”

This index has been developed by Daniel Lewis, an economist in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Karel Mertens, a senior economic policy advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, and James Stock, the Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy, Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University.

The index is not an official forecast of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, its president, the Federal Reserve System, or the Federal Open Market Committee.

This is an interview with Anders Tegnell, chief epidemiologist at Sweden’s Public Health Agency.

Tegnell: I don't know it well enough but it still seems to me that the Americans let coronavirus go too far before any real strategy came into place. One of the real big problems in the beginning was the lack of testing. I'm also not really sure how well the U.S. health system can change as dramatically as we in Sweden have been able to, for example. We have almost double the intensive care capacity that we had a couple of weeks ago. Being centrally organized and steered (as part of a state-funded system) allows for greater flexibility in changing the health system. I'm not sure how well that can be done in the U.S. with all the private actors and insurance firms. It may make it more difficult to handle this kind of situation.

The skinny: the health-care system in the United States is so balkanized and thread-bare that the United States would not be able to effectively pursue the same policy as Sweden, according to the chief epidemiologist of Sweden's Public Health Agency.

The idea of "herd immunity" is said to occur when 70% of the population has immunity, thereby giving the virus less people to infect. However, that depends upon there being immunity from this virus in the first place.

Some virus's are such that no immunity is possible -- like aids and the common cold -- because the virus mutates too quickly for the immune cells to produce reliable anti-bodies (which attach to the virus, preventing it from attaching to cell receptors). The flu virus also mutates regularly, and some strains are more deadly than others. This is why you have yearly flu vaccines. Virus's also tend to hide within the organisms they infect and can remain dormant (or in remission) only to resurface at a later date -- like the herpes virus.

Right now the science is not solid on there being a guarantee of any type of immunity. There have been reports of people being reinfected out of China and South Korea. I don't pretend to have any expertise on this issue. I just read. Here are some sources I feel are fair and reliable:

In South Korea, health officials are trying to solve a mystery: why 163 people who recovered from coronavirus have retested positive, according to the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC).

The same has been recorded in China, where some coronavirus patients tested positive after seeming to recover, although there are no official figures.

That raises the question: can you get reinfected with coronavirus?

In South Korea, the proportion of cases that retest positive is low -- of the 7,829 people who have recovered from coronavirus there, 2.1% retested positive, the KCDC said Friday. It is not clear how many of the people who have recovered have been tested again.

From the Quartz link above:

One explanation could simply be that the tests administered to these patients weren’t sensitive enough to distinguish between an active infection and one from which a patient has mostly recovered. “What many people don’t understand is that PCR tests simply for the virus’ genetic material and it is not an assay for active virus,” says Richard Condit, a molecular biologist and professor emeritus at the University of Florida College of Medicine

As the body is recovering from an infection, it clears what Condit calls “virus litter”—inactive debris of viral cells—from the lungs. That litter can be coughed up into the throat, where clinicians take a sample, and a sensitive diagnostic test might mistake that debris for an active infection. It’s also possible—though rare—for a swab to pick up virus in the throat but for that virus to never lead to an active infection.

There could be other testing issues, too. False negatives are surprisingly common, notes Purvi Parikh, an immunologist at NYU Langone Health. Sometimes healthcare workers don’t collect enough material from a patient to get a clear answer; sometimes the test themselves vary so widely that a negative in one could be a positive in another.

Another possibility is that the amount of virus in the patients’ bodies dipped, then spiked again. “They could have had low levels [of the virus] that the test wasn’t picking up and started to replicate again,” says Brianne Barker, an associate biology professor at Drew University. Viruses can reactivate or resurge after a period of latency in the body, though it’s more common in other kinds of viruses—herpes, for example, and varicella, the virus that causes chickenpox and shingles. If SARS-CoV-2 could act similarly, the body may have some immunity when it resurges, meaning that a person may not be able to transmit the virus or that symptoms could be much more mild the second time around.

From the Reuter's link above:

Why, he asked, did tests say he still had the virus more than two months after he first contracted it?

The answer to that question is a mystery baffling doctors on the frontline of China’s battle against COVID-19, even as it has successfully slowed the spread of the coronavirus across the country.

Chinese doctors in Wuhan, where the virus first emerged in December, say a growing number of cases in which people recover from the virus, but continue to test positive without showing symptoms, is one of their biggest challenges as the country moves into a new phase of its containment battle.

Those patients all tested negative for the virus at some point after recovering, but then tested positive again, some up to 70 days later, the doctors said. Many have done so over 50-60 days.

But regardless of all that, let's think about this. What meaning does "Herd immunity" have when a virus might reinfect fairly soon after recovery, or can remain dormant? That's a difficult question that I cannot answer, but it certainly must give pause to any knee-jerk turn towards the option of "herd immunity", I think. This is why we need science, and the schools that teach science, because not only do we need to know facts, but we also need to train our youth the understand how to ascertain or have access to reliable facts.

Wednesday, 29 April 2020 at 9h 21m 7s

The number of COVID deaths is higher than the official count

50% higher for some regions.

So the current US Death toll (58,459 as of 9am today Pacific Time) is very likely to be at least 20% higher, or more than 70,000. In 10 weeks !!! The toll from 2017-18 flu season (which was the highest in the decade) was about 61,000 over 12 months.

Total deaths in seven states that have been hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic are nearly 50 percent higher than normal for the five weeks from March 8 through April 11, according to new death statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That is 9,000 more deaths than were reported as of April 11 in official counts of deaths from the coronavirus.

[SOURCE:Josh Katz, Denise Lu and Margot Sanger-Katz | New York Times | 28 April 2020]

Click here for the New York Times Coronavirus map and case count for California.

To be fair, I will share the response to my first reply, as well as my second response.

From: person whom I am keeping anonymous out of respect

Ginardo...that is very entertaining that your are associating me with political groups funded by billionaires and calling me "patrician". It seems the entire establishment is fighting my opinions. But what do I know. Glad you like my quotes. Are they striking home even just a little? Smile

My views stand for the 50% of all family restaurants and business that probably won't re-open, the children of unemployed parents, the 730 newly unemployed for every person who died, the $60K in debt put on every citizen who receives a $1200 check that will go to bail out the richest in the country. You know, the billionaires that support my views. Hahaha. You really are pretty entertaining. Thanks for making me laugh. Its good to laugh in these sad times. If I didn't laugh, my heart would break.

Read my next thread just submitted. There is absolutely no proof that the corona virus is the "causative agent" of the pneumonia in the victims as you suggest and describe. Are you a scientist? So you are building your vision house on sand as is the entire establishment. It started with bad science, which led to bad medicine and from there to bad politics. That is what the billionaires and patricians supported. Not me and my ideas. But of course you are free to attach yourself to whatever ideas you like and make them public. Remember "three things that cannot be hidden long, the sun, the moon and the truth"

In case you haven't noticed, most if not all the CV-19 vaccine makers stocks have been declining for the last couple of weeks after a blistering run. I believe the word is getting out. They've all been chasing the wrong thing. And by the time they get something, it will already be over. How about this quote from Ghandi "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win”.

~~~~

From: Ginardo Napoli (me)

No one cares. I love how you wear the Ghandi quote as if it applies to all these libertarian astro-turf uprisings funded by ideologues of the likes of the Koch brothers because they want an aristocracy. Libertarianism is a bunk philiosophy and like the "Right of Kings" spiel is used to justify the slow steady destruction of our democracy state.

I realize I'm wasting my time, but let's be clear on one thing : No one is fighting you. Not any phrase from all that gibberish you utter above effectively counters any of what I said. You want to pretend you care about the "working" stiffs. You want to bring up the word "establishment" as if you are fighting some establishment. You hide behind your quotes and talk about "bad science" and vaccine maker stocks all you want -- nothing you say refutes any of my points.

Look at the economic response France, Denmark, Germany, and even England did in response to the economic situation. If you don't like the stimulus or the way the loans to small business was mismanaged, that is not because of the lock-down. That's because of the mismanagement by the current administration (and don't get me started on that, because I'm trying to be polite here). But what else would you expect from a Treasury Security who was the California eviction king during the 2009-10 home mortgage crisis and is currently salivating about destroying the Post Office.

You speak in jargon and hide behind misplaced quotations.

Please go away.

Tuesday, 28 April 2020 at 14h 36m 0s

Interesting video on the creation of Uruguay

Uruguay is snuggled in the middle of South American, on the East coast. Brazil is north. Argentina is South and West.

Tuesday, 28 April 2020 at 14h 24m 10s

My response

A patrician in my neighborhood who posted a link to a political action group called FreedomFest that asked why we should "reconsider" staying at home orders.

All you have is a cute allegory about a tiger, and a Mark Twain quote and oddly no science at all. What does your viewpoint of liberty have to do with a novel virus that we are now discovering attacks the lungs, heart, the epithelial cells of blood vessels, kidney's and the liver; is more contagious than the flu, and at least 5 times more deadly. We also are not sure if this virus can mutate into a more deadly version, or if we can get re-infected like another coronavirus called "the common cold."

But patrician's like yourself are not the ones who will be vulnerable to exposure to this disease. You wrap yourself in a peculiar version of "freedom" -- a freedom to do whatever you want without responsibility to anyone else, because you just externalize your bunk philosophy on the lower classes.

Peace out.”

These people drape themselves unctuously with their fake freedom. They aren't above associating with right-extremists either. That's why you see Confederate flags at the lockdown "protests" in Lansing, Michigan.